


Extracurricular Activities

by mad_and_moonly



Category: Mad Men
Genre: Ableist Language, Alternate Universe - High School, Multi, formerly 'Eighth Period We Have Business', i'm thinking more 'freaks and geeks' than 'sixteen candles' if you feel me, my sister said i should change the title ヽ(≧Д≦)ノ
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-14
Updated: 2013-08-13
Packaged: 2017-12-20 03:32:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/882445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad_and_moonly/pseuds/mad_and_moonly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Listen. I have a 4.0 GPA to keep up and a scholarship that I’m not gonna lose just because you’re lazy. So start drawing. And get your cleats off of my desk before I smack ‘em off of your goddamn legs.”</p>
<p>Peggy doesn't mind group projects, really, she doesn't. But hours spent motivating the school’s resident stoner jock wear thin on the nerves. Especially when said stoner jock keeps making passes at her and eventually she fails to find it nauseating.</p>
<p>SCDPCGC High-- Class of '88. </p>
<p>Mad Men high school AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Meat is Murder

 

The school board caught a lot of shit from the name alone.

When seven old WASPy dudes decide to create a magnet school for the business minded members of the next generation and they can't decide on a lake or a mountain range or some other picturesque shit to name it after, they name it after themselves-- after _all_ of themselves. And, Peggy Olson thought with a nervous twist of her mouth and an accidental bite into her already toothmarked pencil, their narcissism made for really shitty banners.

Joan was leaning in the wings of bleachers and filing her nails-- preferring to observe from afar as Peggy struggled to fit the last two letters of the school's obnoxiously long acronym onto the roll of paper that she'd helped her cart out earlier that day. Actually, it was the only help Peggy had gotten from Joan since the redhead realized that sketching out this poster would entail some time spent sitting on the gym floor. And that meant potentially getting her cheer uniform dirty which was, as Joan had informed her while fishing the nail file out of her cleavage, a no no.

"I got as far as the second 'C'." 

Joan peered down at her from her vantage point at the top corner of the bleachers-- the Brains' section-- Peggy thought with a private smirk.

How ironic.

"You should have measured ahead of time. You know, find out how long the banner actually is and divide it into seven even sections. One for each letter?" Joan's voice rose with the inflection that meant that this should have been fucking obvious. 

Peggy looked at the banner with new disdain-- glancing over the 'S' that was almost as wide as she was long and the final 'C' that was the width of her Trapper Keeper- and realized that maybe Joanie's seat wasn't so badly chosen.

Her hair fell into her face, and she'd have pulled her scrunchie from her backpack if it didn't mean crossing the gym and potentially having to confront Joan, who was gloating in the corner.

"Did you remember the poster paint?" she asked pointedly, because she knew Joan hadn't. There was no way the bottles would fit into the purse slung over Joan’s hip that could barely hold a tube Lip Smackers and leave room for a breathmint.

Joan rose to her feet, loudly descending the bleachers in a pair of immaculate white Keds. She wasn’t mean, per se, but she was a year older and inhabited a social circle that Peggy could only infiltrate in her dreams and that gave her all of the leverage here. Plus, Joan had it out for Peggy ever since she got that Joey kid expelled for being a complete prick.

Peggy wasn’t a snitch, but you can’t spraypaint something that offensive about someone in the girl’s locker room and expect to get away with it. Joyce’s feminist rants had to hit a nerve at some point.

"This poster thing  doesn't need to be that pretty." Joan crashed her way down the final three rows- opting to stomp down the metal seats instead of the wooden stairs, and moved toward the gym's double doors.

"It's not going to hang up on the wall or anything. The football team couldn't care less if the letters are even." Joan cocked her hip and offered Peggy a condescending sham of a sweet smile. "It could be blank, and they wouldn't be able to tell the difference because they're going to be smashing through your hours of labor hopped up on adrenaline and God knows what else."

Peggy was prepared to mumble something about avoiding the wrath of the Homecoming Committee before realizing how stupid it was. After all, she was president.

"It's just..." Peggy offered lamely, dusting off the heel of her hand where some dirt that had probably been grimed into this floor since the sixties darkened it. "There will be pictures and stuff."

Joyce had promised her a decent spread in the yearbook with a footnote conspicuous enough to be seen by even the most nearsighted admissions officers. It paid to have a friend with photography skills.

Joan rolled her eyes and turned on her heel toward the brightness of the school's front doors. By the time she answered, she was yelling down the halls. "Suit yourself. I'm sure you'll figure something out."

She paused by the door-- deviating slightly from the megabitch routine to explain. "I have cheer practice in fifteen. At least tell Dawn I showed up. I promised her that I'd  help you with the poster if she put in a good word for me when Draper grades our next assignment."

She practically bounced away-- the short skirt swishing around her annoyingly perfect butt, and why didn't Peggy's ponytails ever sway like that? Peggy stared sadly after Joan, poking her lip out a bit. If she couldn’t appeal to Joan’s character, she’d sure as hell take her pity. For a moment Joan looked sympathetic, although she was kind of a blobby shape while Peggy had her glasses off. But she could hear fine and Joanie wasn’t one to suffer fools gladly.

"Quit it with the puppy dog eyes and put some blush on. You look anemic."

The front doors shut with a metallic clank and Joan disppeared into the sunshine.

When Joan's echo finally stopped ricocheting off of the lockers Peggy practically ran for her backpack, fishing out her green scrunchie and a smashed granola bar-- wrapping the scrunchie around her annoying hair in one practiced motion and unwrapping the granola bar just as quickly-- stomach growling painfully because she'd reviewed her SAT terms through lunch instead of eating.

Peggy lethargically moved toward the wrinkled sheet of paper, and for the first time that semester she wished she were back at St. Joseph's. Yeah, the extracurriculars were shitty, and the looks she got from randy old men when she was wearing her scratchy uniform were unsavory, but parochial schools didn't give a rat's ass about football.

She envisioned the members of the boy's chorus pirouetting through a banner covered in half and quarter notes in their starched uniforms.

They'd probably get fucking nosebleeds from running into the paper unlike the  beefcakes that filled the ranks of the football team. She could make this banner without giving a damn if a single member of the football team thanked her. They were idiots-- the lot of them. Annoying, immature, protein gorging idiots.

Besides, her tastes ran to more thoughtful, considerate (read: nonthreatening) boys-- boys with hobbies that didn’t involve ramming into people at top speed.

Suddenly thinking better of finishing, she shouldered her backpack and headed through the doors Joan had disappeared through, bangs whipping against her forehead and scuffed Mary Jane's smacking the pavement when a glance at her watch prompted her to run.

She was obviously going to be late for swim practice.

 

\---

 

Peggy likes Abe because he doesn't tell her what to do.

When the school administration decided that three years as swim team captain were as illustrious a record as any student could ask for, they barred Peggy from any position of power that involved their particular pit of chlorine and installed Abe instead. But he was a figurehead-- the Queen Elizabeth II to her Parliament-- and he mostly slept through practice or didn’t show up altogether. So when she saw him-- sprawled on a towel he’d spread poolside with an arm flung over his eyes-- she guessed that the freshmen could have an easy day every once in awhile.

“How’s the hunger strike?

Abe lifted his arm just high enough to register Peggy’s presence before dropping it heavily.

“Shitty.”

He lustfully eyed a bag of Cheetos poking out of a Lisa Frank backpack.

“Please tell me you’re coming to our gallery. I swear to God, Joyce will decapitate me if you don’t show.”

Abe had caught her peeling off her sweater, and Peggy’s voice was muffled through the wool.

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world. How are you gonna fight... What is it this time?”

“The factory farm system.”

“Oh yeah. How are you gonna abolish the evils of the factory farm system without a head?” She’d tackled her sweater and was moving on to her gym shorts while Abe peeked at her-- a little obviously before rolling onto his stomach.  Jesus, he was thin already-- Peggy could see the ridges of his ribs and his shoulderblades poked out and now even his fucking Speedo sagged around his scrawny butt. This hunger strike was the third one this semester after Abe caught wind of Bobby Sands. First there was apartheid, then nuclear power--.

“Hey, if you’re feeling too weak, I can run the drills for you.”

“I’m not weak. I’m strengthened by the thanks of our Mother Gaia-- I’m just... tired.”

“Well if you’re too tired then--”

Abe waved his assent and laid down heavily on his towel.

"Just don't push them too hard.”  He stretched like a cat contented with a lifetime of doing nothing. "We don't want a repeat of the PS-115 fiasco."

Peggy raised her arms overhead to warm them up and looked at Abe who had thrown his arm over his eyes again and was breathing shallowly.

"Those eighth graders didn't learn how to swim right. I had to start from scratch."

Abe sat up with a burst of energy belying his condition, and raised his eyebrows.

"Yeah? Well you can't put eighth graders through six full laps of the butterfly and then expect them to have a successful meet afterward."

Peggy bent to touch her toes, stretching the backs of her legs while Abe openly gawked at her.

"Whatever. They got their damn Oreos afterwards, didn't they?"

She tugged down her blue Lycra swim cap and dropped into the pool-- instantly calmer with the water surrounding her. Abe groaned loudly enough at the mention of food that she could hear him underwater and he didn't drop it when she surfaced.  

"You must mean the Oreos that they all barfed up onto the sidewalk? 

"That was one kid, okay. And he was slow as fuck anyway. If you coddle them, they'll never grow."  

Abe dropped it then, realizing that this could escalate into an argument that he was too weak to win and his voice changed into something low and conspiratorial.

“I, uh, if you come to Joyce’s gallery on Saturday I kind of, um, have a table set up and you could see some of my uncensored stuff. The fucking lightweight newspaper staff can’t handle printing what really goes into that radioactive sludge they call meatloaf. I have an interview with a kid that swears Blankenship is growing an eleventh finger from exposure to it.”

Peggy threw her arms over the side of the pool with a slap that rang off of the tiles, tugging herself up in a single lithe movement, and halfway glorying in the feel of Abe’s eyes on her.

“No one wants to read about the lunchlady’s extra finger. Your editor is right.”

Abe still stared with that facial expression that meant he was either drunk or horny, and her ego responded more than her body did.  

She knew that look. She’d seen it a bunch of times this past summer after work when Joyce would drag her downtown to shows and gallery openings and she was exhausted from wrangling with screaming kids all day (seriously, fuck lifeguarding in July) and wanted nothing more than to slump into her pajamas and watch Double Dare with her cat. Somehow they’d ended up hanging out as a trio. Abe was a permanent fixture in makeshift bars where the floor was too sticky and where they had to sneak in through the back and the music was more loud than good. But instead of smiling at her from behind a paper cup full of whatever Joyce had managed to smuggle into a movie theater or after the times (yes, multiple _times_ ) that they’d ended up making out in her car he was looking up at her from the pool floor with a little grin of expectation that was kind of annoying.

"You have really nice shoulders, you know that." Abe said, voice low and heavy with the intention of being sultry but falling horribly flat, and she felt like laughing. The food deprivation was making he poor boy delirious.

Peggy took a series of slow steps toward Abe, kneeling at his side and not missing the small hitch in his breath, the way his heartbeat fluttered in his bare throat. He was more Joyce's friend than hers, and Joyce obviously wasn't interested in him in that way. From this angle,the scrawniness was almost appealing. She leaned over him, head hovering over his for a moment-- slightly woozy with the sudden motion and the punch of the chlorine.

“Thanks.”

Abe propped up onto his elbows.

"Someone could rush in here at any minute." He raised an eyebrow in an attempt at making this clandestine or sexy or something and when she smashed her mouth to his it felt good to be wanted for once.

Peggy needed this-- a break from her fucking mountain of academic tension, and thinking with something other than her brain she leaned more fully  into his mouth, but the kiss was all wrong-- all overslick lips and sour tasting from Abe's fast and when she pulled away from him she felt queasy. Abe stared up at her like the experience made his life worth living, and Peggy started to question her choice in boys who, yeah, probably wouldn’t break her heart but also wouldn’t shut the fuck up about Morrisey.

 

Okay.

Surprises aren't a bad thing when you're prepared. 

Take pop quizzes for example. Peggy aces pop quizzes-- blows them out of the water-- because every minute spent reviewing her notes on the bus means a potential ride out of this godforsaken town. And when Pryce announces to the few awake students in his fucking snoozer of an AP Lang and Comp class that they'll be quizzed on some obscure passage buried in the footnotes of a poem he assigned two months ago, she's ready. But she doesn't like surprises that pop up out of nowhere; shit like stepping on your kid neighbor's Lego or finding out that your dad has another family.

But that's a point for another day.

So when the pool's doors banged open, and and someone yelled "Fuck you, Ginzo!" before a fucking tidal wave of chlorinated water splashed out of the center lane, and Abe jumped up only to slam into the wall Peggy was, in fact, surprised.

"Fucking hell!" Abe screamed, blood streaming from behind the fingers he'd cupped around his nose.

He swayed with the loss of blood and lack of, well, nutrition and Peggy couldn't catch him before he slumped to the floor.

"FUCK!"

The boy thrown into the pool had recovered by now-- the kid didn't really process pain-- and was swiping dark strands of hair from his eyes while screaming at the top of his lungs.

"You coulda fuckin' killed me! I swear to God my head hit the bottom." He glanced at Peggy-- all wet clothes and spiking lashes and confused rage-- and then his eyes drifted to where Abe had faceplanted into the floor-- a small pool of blood splattered onto the tiles, and Michael Ginsberg clawed his fingers through his wet hair.

"I'm gonna die. I'm bleedin' all over the place and I'm gonna die. Am I gonna die? You gotta tell me."

He was in his street clothes-- his varsity jacket saturated into a deeper blue with the water and she could see his sneakers circling in the center lane where he was manically treading water.

"Did you take your Ritalin today? God, you--" she began, and then stopped because a noise that was unsurprising and loud and unfailingly obnoxious reverberated off of the pool walls.

Stan was here and he was laughing. Big throaty laughs that made every part of her body go hot.

Grabbing the closest projectile she could find and working with a rapidly calculated trajectory, she threw the Lisa Frank backpack toward his head, but her throwing arm sucked ass and it and it landed in the pool with a echoing smack which of course only made Stan laugh harder.

"Shut up!" Peggy screamed so hard that her throat ached and stomped her foot-- feeling too much like they were six years old again and Stan was cracking up after throwing sand into her hair.

He straightened from where he'd been stooped near the window-- hair flopping into his eyes and staring at _her_ as if _she'd_ done something wrong. "You shut up."

"You shut up."

"Make me."

"Maybe I will, you dick."

"Look, Miss Lifeguard," Stan grinned-- all the lazy confidence of starting quarterbacks who'd come before him sleazing up his smile. "Why don't you find some kindness in your little shriveled monkey heart to get veggie boy some damn medical attention."

“I’m okay.” Ginsberg crowed, still treading water and panting a little with the exertion.

“No one’s even talking to you. Get the hell out of the pool.”

Ginsberg swivelled his head to look at the Cheetos and sparkling pink notebook that were now floating around him before swimming to the edge.

Stan stared at her through narrowed eyes-- from her swim capped head, over her pilling old practice suit, to her pruning toes and another hot flush of embarrassment flared out of nowhere.

Asshole.

Abe groaned some unintelligible sentence about tempeh and seeing him grab at his bloodied mouth and nose had her turning on her heels running. 

She sprinted past the locker rooms, past the questioning stares of the freshmen who'd just returned with ice cream cones, until her lungs burned a little, and she reached the lifeguard's office and found a phone.

After a number of rings that felt like forever, the dispatch finally picked up. Peggy clutched the gummy receiver until her knuckles turned white.

"911, this is Faye speaking. What's your emergency?"

Some asshole decided to ruin my life.

Peggy inhaled to shake the quaver from her voice. "I'm calling to report an injury--"

And as the dispatch guided Peggy through the instructions she already knew from her first aid course-- don't move him, keep the area around his head clear, try to keep him speaking-- she felt a little calmer. Her heart stopped its thundering and the flush that had burned across her body subsided with each of the dispatch's measured sentences.

This was typical Stan. One minute she’s getting the little bit of action she allowed herself to, and the next  minute he and his weird ass friend are bursting into her consciousness-- forever heralded by the unmistakable screech of scuffing Nikes.

By the time the paramedics arrived, and whiny little Wendy Gleason's backpack had been fished out of the pool filter, Stan was nowhere to be found, fuck him. And When the truck finally pulled out of the parking lot and the sirens faded into the darkness Peggy shivered because she was wearing a swimsuit outside in October.

And, as she realized at seven A.M. The next morning-- dodging Joyce's prodding about whether Abe's brains were really splattered all over the pool's walls-- the rumor mill was running full speed ahead. So when first period finally rolled around and her required tutoring hour was going even more slowly than usual, she wasn't surprised when Meredith turned to her and spat out that even though she wasn't any good at Algebra 2, at least she didn't attack people and try to eat their brains.

 

 --

 

The day didn’t improve. 

“Hey, it’s not really one hundred percent your fault.” Joyce wasn’t exactly the best at reassuring people. “I mean, it wasn’t intentional. At least you didn’t stab him or shoot him or some shit like that.” She unsuccessfully tried to shove her skateboard into her locker, and the loud clunking caught the attention of a chubby kid in a Krishna t-shirt who glared at her from behind a paperback copy of _On the Road_.

“No one wants to hear about your insatiable love of violence, Joyce.”

She rolled her eyes, and with a final clunk finally succeeded in jamming the board in and slammed the locker door shut for good measure.

“Eat a dick, Kinsey. I’m in the middle of a conversation.” Joyce turned toward Peggy, twirling her newest piercing as they walked. “Anyway--”

The two of them stopped suddenly. A small crowd had amassed just short of Peggy’s locker.

“What the--” Peggy shouldered her way through the milling bodies-- most of them giggling until they saw her and fell silent-- and when she reached her locker, the crowd waited with baited breath until a sophomore that she recognized from Chemistry Lab  lisped through his braces. "Gotdamn"

Scribbled in purple glitter pen on My Little Pony stationery was a note.

Well, not a note, but a string of words-- obviously Wendy’s handiwork judging by the glitter and the hearts dotting the i’s. The crowd dispersed when Peggy didn’t give them a volcanic reaction, instead calmly pulling the note down and inputting her combination. She had SGA in an hour. She didn’t need this.

Joyce laughed a little nervously while Peggy scraped the residue of the tape off of her locker with her thumbnail-- and pulled at the neckline of her Siouxise and the Banshees t-shirt before trying to lighten the mood.

“‘Zombie Girl’, huh. It’s creative. I’ll give ‘em that.”

Peggy shot a warning look at Joyce and resumed her scraping. Wendy had the motive to be pissed at her, but she didn’t have the soulless level of evil required to think up something like this. And Wendy couldn't perfect her bilateral breathing, much less draw anatomically correct female zombies. And Peggy couldn’t for the life of her figure out what massive douchebag could come up with such a ridiculous fucking story.

Just kidding. She knew.

 

 

 

 


	2. The Pure Gold Baby

 

"Margaret Olson, you will not use the Lord’s name in vain so long as you are under my roof.” Peggy glanced at her mother over a bowl of Captain Crunch and futilely kicked at the legs of her chair. There was no way she was getting dragged into another disastrous day with Joan-- no fucking way. Ever since Katherine met oh so lovely Gail at bridge club or that hole in the wall deli in Yonkers or some equally dismal place the two of them had been forcing their daughters together in the form of outings that usually ended with some embarrassing story that Joan eagerly shared with the cheer squad the next day.

“Come on. It’ll be fun!”

As a rule it would not be fun. Gail wanted her daughter to be more demure and Katherine wanted someone winsome and marriageable and their little forced excursions reflected that. Because seriously, what seventeen year old is caught dead at a tea party?

“But--”

“No ‘buts’, young lady.”

Katherine swiped at her  brow with the back of her wrist leaving a streak of orange icing, and her tiny mouth pinched until her lipstick feathered even more than usual.

“I have too much work to do for this bake sale and I will not argue with my own child. Besides, every woman needs to master the art of entertaining a guest. And Joanie is such a lovely girl.”

Peggy considered mentioning that lovely Joanie was rumored to give legendary head but decided against it.

Katherine picked up her rolling pin and proceeded to smack the ever loving shit out of a slab of chocolate chip cookie dough.

"If you can watch me slave in this kitchen with a clear conscience, then the least that you could do is let her sleep over for a week. Gail and I have to staff six fundraisers this weekend, and this is only the first of them. The two of us are--" Peggy watched her mother yawn extensively into her floury hands. “-- very tired, and you two can keep each other from getting into trouble.”

“That literally makes zero sense. If we’re both likely to get in trouble and you put us together won’t that be...” She paused for dramatic effect. “double trouble?”

Anita slammed through the door just in time to groan at the pun and drop an armful of grocery bags on the wood laminate counter. "I'm taking Dean to Mommy and Me at seven."

“I need the car tonight.” Peggy yelled after Anita who had vaulted up the stairs in three seconds flat. This gallery thing was likely to be a fucking disaster anyway. God, she had to beg her mother for permission to go watch a couple of binge drinking kids glue cans together and shit.

“No you don’t. Joan’s staying over, remember? Dear, it’s really about time you made some girlfriends.”

“I already have two friends, and one of them is a girl.” She remembered the purpling bruise that spread across Abe’s nose in homeroom and decided that maybe she had just one friend.

Peggy’s mother wiped her fingers on her needlessly frilly apron and stood stock-still for a minute surrounded by the smell of nine things all baking. Peggy's eyes skated over the flour dusting the counter, Katherine’s yellowing recipe book and a tiny basket of Hershey's kisses. Her mother was frowning in the afternoon light-- a facial posture Peggy recognized from her mirror-- squinting with an older pair of Peggy's own pale blue eyes and silently scrubbing her mind for a rebuttal. This was how the two of them existed now-- interacting only in arguments and slipping in small knives of cruelty when the opportunity presented itself.

“Joyce doesn’t count.” she said, and smiled her small mouthed smile.

Wow. Homophobia never sounded so chipper.

“Well she’s a girl. And she’s my friend. So I guess you could say she’s my girlfr--”

“Stop.” All of the phony motherliness drained from Katherine in an instant as the warden in her took over. "Joan is staying here. That's final. And I want you to clean your room before she arrives. Go on." She waved Peggy off with an authority that didn't welcome questioning.

Scrambling for some self determination in this mother-daughter shitfest Peggy jumped from her chair and, in an act of decided rebellion, did NOT put her bowl in the sink. “I’m going to my room.”

"Yes, work on that pigsty, please. But I might need you to come taste my cookies later."

"I don't want your yawny cookies. I hope the bridge club chokes on them."

She muttered under her breath and she could've sworn her mother's supersonic hearing picked it up and when she ran after Anita up the stairs she knew she'd have hell to pay later that night.

But this afternoon Peggy Olson gave no fucks.

 

 

\---

 

 

"Don't get too comfortable. We're not staying."

Apparently a fucking geyser of assertiveness had been simmering inside of her, and she ran with it.

Joan's eyes narrowed and crossed her arms over her pink sweatshirt. She'd been cooly eyeing every stuffed animal on Peggy's bed before stepping over her cat with high kneed disgust.

"Excuse me?"

"I guess I'm just saying that I have somewhere to go to tonight. Hey, if you want to stay here you can. I'll leave you some food and stuff."

"I'm not a gerbil, Peggy. Where are you going?" Suddenly very interested in what could possibly turn into a lunchtime hit, Joan cocked her head to the side and dropped her duffel directly on top of Duck who yelped out a horrified meow before scuttling away.

"It's this gallery in the Village." Peggy said, trying to mirror Joan's crossed arms and realizing she looked too afraid to seem confident. "A bunch of different artists from around town are gonna be there and I can't miss it because--"

"You can't miss it because of Joyce." Joan finished, and jabbed at a pile of dirty laundry with her toe. "I heard about it already."

"How? Joyce said it was underground or something. Are you really dressed for that?" Peggy gestured at Joan's pristine red and white uniform. “You could change into some of my clothes if you want. I don’t care if they get dirty or anything.” Her voice strained a little at the idea of having to be _nice_  for an entire fucking week.

"I'll be fine." Joan glanced at Duck who was giving her a death stare from behind Peggy's ankles. "You do know that underground doesn't mean literally underground?"

"Of course I do." She hadn't at the first show, but she was learning. "It's just a bunch of punk kids who yell a lot and push each other around. Joyce tries to sell them photographs of themselves when they get too drunk, and the ones that no one buys go in her gallery. This one’s got a theme that’s a surprise.” She wiggled her fingers in the air on 'surprise' and stared at the ridiculous albedo of Joan’s sneakers. “People puke on the floor in there. A lot.”

“Look. I don’t care. I just need to get out of here.” Joan’s eyes flitted from the laundry shored up against the door to the stacks of wrinkled papers on Peggy’s desk. “Your room is gross and I hate it here. Are you guys poor?”

“No. I have a job and I hate it here too, but I’m stuck here permanently.” Peggy called over her shoulder and pushed the pile of laundry completely under her bed. She was admittedly a little winded by the time she finished kicking everything neat. The less time Joan spent in her room the better-- there were enough tchotchkes packed in here to be blackmail fodder for months."And it isn't gross. It's lived in.” Peggy said-- stuffing four McDonalds wrappers in her desk drawer.

“Whatever.” Joan huffed. There was a lot of that-- the quick exhaling and eye rolls and toe tapping that meant this was gonna be one long fucking night.

“We’re gonna leave, but we can’t go downstairs. My mom’s patrolling the stairway.” Joan raised her perfectly arched eyebrows when Peggy slid four copies of Sweet Valley High between her mattress and boxspring. “She’s being such a bitch.” she threw in, for coolness' sake.

"What other way?" Joan broke her searing eye contact with Duck long enough to see Peggy throw her leg over the windowsill.

“Are you kidding me?”

“Do you wanna go or not?” Joan looked past Peggy out of her window, possibly realizing that they were parallel to several treetops and the distance to the ground was within leg breaking range.

“Fine.”

Joan, of course, escaped from the first floor window with typical cheerleader ease while Peggy scraped the hell out of her knees on the bricks but soon they were down the block and surrounded by the burning leaves smell of the fall night.

 

 

\---

 

 

"Don't you have a car?" They were halfway to wherever they were supposed to be and rushing through the seediest corner of the Village and Joan’s cheer uniform was attracting more stares than she could deflect by flicking people off.

“My sister has to take Dean to his daycare or whatever. Plus, the transmission is shot, and if my mom heard the engine turn over--”

“Yeah.” Joan huffed. “I get it.”

“So...” Peggy began, seriously pushing the envelope as far as this whole budding friendship deal went. “Why did you have to come over to my house?”

Joan started a little and looked down the block after what sounded creepily like a chainsaw and Peggy remembered that Halloween was just three days away.

“There’s this boy, Greg, and I don’t want to see him anymore because... Because I just don’t want to. But he comes from an excellent family, and in my house it’s like fucking women’s lib never happened. She wants to marry me off or something, I swear to God.” She blew a piece of red hair that had broken free from her white barrette out of her eyes. “It’s ridiculous.”

Peggy knew Greg from a couple student council meetings-- a JROTC kid with a batshit temper-- and she figured want to get away from his weird ass too. The air thickened a bit with the embarrassment of something too personal spoken out loud and when they turned the corner Peggy was glad to feel the bass pulsing beneath her feet. 

“This is it.”

Joan covered her ears and ducked into the hole in the warehouse’s wall that served as a door and wrinkled her nose for the nine hundredth time that day. “Oh my God, this place is worse than your room.” And it was, with the floor covered in whatever the fuck made it so sticky and the walls plastered with peeling posters from bands whose members were most likely dead by now. Some dude with purple hair was plucking a mandolin that he’d hooked up to an amp and the resulting shriek was unbearable.

“Joyce is in here.” Peggy led Joan away from purple hair who was wailing about a lost love and playing the same goddamn minor chord sequence over and over again into the side room that Joyce reserved for her photography hustle. The two of them clacked through the red, yellow, and green beads that covered the doorway and Peggy tripped on a pile of cords stretched across the floor and skidded across the concrete. When she kind of gained her footing her knees were worse, if that was even possible, and she lifted her arm to shield her eyes from the strobe light before scanning the room for witnesses.

Joyce was bent over a pile of developing film, Abe was scowling behind his booth and sitting cross legged on a pile of old dropcloths, and then there was... Kenny?-- and holy shit, no.

_Fuck._

“Hey, granny. Hey, Tits Holloway.”

“Joyce.” Peggy thought it made sense to speak to the one person in the room who didn’t definitely hate her. “What are they doing here? What is he doing here?" she whispered, a little too loudly, because Ken shrugged his shoulders in annoyance while the “he” in question adjusted his stupid fucking headband and smirked.

Joyce glanced at Stan (disgustedly) and then at Ken (neutrally) and then at Peggy (apologetically).

“They sell their shit here too. I don't own the place and, I can’t keep them from showin’ up if they want to. It's a free country." Abe groaned as Joyce walked away from her impromptu darkroom and toward an area partitioned off by huge sheets of translucent plastic.

"This isn't a free country. Not really." Abe said, staring at everyone but Joyce with barely disguised venom.

“Shut up, Abe. The show’s starting soon and, uh--” Joyce looked Joan up and down-- pausing for a second on the sneakers. “You might wanna make tracks, Holloway, honest. This isn’t your scene, babe. Go hang with the asshats populating the gift shop.” Joyce smacked the side of her perpetually malfunctioning Polaroid and tugged at the black jelly bracelets covering her forearms.

"I'll make it out alright.” Joan said, unintimidated.

"Don't say I didn't warn you." Joyce clicked her Polaroid into a tripod bolted to the floor and met Joan's annoyed look with a smile. "Security. In case these two roid heads try to rob me."

“Hey.” Ken could excuse accusations of theft but didn’t take well to having his All-American halfback schtick insulted. “This is all me, Joyce. I worked hard for this body and even though Stan misses half of our practices he works hard too. No drugs.”

“No steroids.” Stan said. “The distinction is important. And you are more than welcome to stay with us, babe. Kenneth and I understand that there's money to be made, and we want in. What the hell happened to your knees?”

“What?” Peggy hadn’t realized she was clenching her jaw until her molars started to ache. It was bad enough that Joan was here bearing witness to her friends' aggressively strange habits. But now part of the football team was present, and Peggy didn't feel like spending another month eating lunch alone. She had friends now, and a promising academic career if she survived long enough to graduate. Everything was flashing before her eyes like some sick fucking movie and Stan was breathing her air again and Kenny (cute fucking SGA president Kenny with the blue eyes and the perfect hair) was staring at Joyce’s patrons like he was in a zoo.

“Yeah, what happened to your knees?” Kenny said, foregoing staring at a rainbow mohawk to offer her a smile that dripped with interest. Didn’t he have a girlfriend? Sylvia or something...

“Nothing.” Peggy said,  pushing a stray piece of hair behind her ear and fighting the blush that was crawling up her neck. “Joyce.” she hissed, but Joyce waved her off and picked up the megaphone she used to overpower the music and narrowed her eyes at Stan.

“Hello and welcome to Ankle Slice. Abraham here will be your curator and I am the featured artist, hold your applause. Please exit through the gift shop and feel free to purchase whatever random shit is  being sold within. Have a nice time in there kids, and don't forget your imaginations.” Joyce smacked a kid in a linen blazer on the butt before mouthing “sorry” to Peggy and disappearing behind the plastic.

“Do you want to, you know, actually go into the gallery or something?” She was mumbling at the spot Joyce had just vacated and Stan stared at Joan’s ankle socks, and then slowly up her legs before following her behind the plastic walls and into the area that held Joyce’s photographs.

“No thanks. I don’t go for that freaky expose stuff. But you could come back to my booth and I’ll show you a couple of my stories.” Peggy pulled a white cat hair from her Northwestern sweatshirt and frowned-- struggling not to roll her eyes.

This wasn’t her first rodeo. Even though this one had a dazzling smile that was like staring into the sun, she knew that all boys operated on basically the same premise; a premise that involved someone taking their clothes off, and this place was way too drafty for any shit like that. But Abe was right there, dodging his curating job behind an issue of Mother Jones and peeking his purple nose over the tops of the pages every so often to check on her-- being more creepy than endearing. He’d jump Ken if he tried anything. And Ken would probably kill him.

Lose-lose.

“Sure. I’d love to see your work. Pryce said you wrote some amazing stuff for his class.”

“Uh, yeah.” Ken said, raising an eyebrow. The school body wasn’t too keen on Peggy’s involvement with the teachers and her reputation as an informant had kept her out of many a party. “Maybe someday I’ll get a portfolio together and you can proofread it before I send it out to any journals. Would you mind doing that for me?”

So that’s what this was about. Peggy knew that nerd fetishes were a thing, but Ken was laying it on pretty fucking thick; he wanted a secretary, not a sexpot. But he was so cute and single if she squinted-- because, come on, Sylvia or whatever would get over it should anything happen. Which it wouldn’t.

So when he grabbed for her hand, pulling her in the direction of a badly lit area on the backside of the gallery she figured she could beg Joyce’s forgiveness for passing up seeing the same weirdly angled photos of people’s ankles blown up and hung on the wall.

“Sure.”

“You’re the best.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Ken was such a doll.

 

 

\---

 

 

“Truth or Dare?”

“Truth.” Stan said, mouth twisting. This was a bad idea. An extremely bad idea, but it was two AM on a Thursday and her head was somewhere beyond the clouds with sleep deprivation.

“Don’t look so excited. Truth is worse.” Peggy said, and fucking giggled.

Ken was picking at a sticker gummed onto his booth’s table, and Joan stopped whining about being bored just long enough to whine about being cold, and both of their heads snapped up at the sound.  Peggy been quiet for the entire night-- watching Stan unsuccessfully flirt with Joan and chuckling evilly to herself.

“What are really you selling over there?” Peggy said, a little slyly, and Joan and Kenny perked up because they too had been wondering what was hidden behind a Batman sheet covering Stan’s corner of the room. “You’re taking in way too much foot traffic just to be selling drawings.”

“Yeah.” Ken trailed off suspiciously. “I’ve been pushing my stuff for hours, and I’ve only sold like two copies of The Punishment of X-4. .”

“With titling like that, who needs competition.” Joan mumbled. “It’s fucking freezing in here. Can we go back to your house?”

“Wait a sec, I just wanna hear this one.”

Stan didn’t look cornered. He looked... triumphant-- cracking that infuriating half smile and staring at her with eyes that were that frustratingly deep green that Peggy felt as a jump in her throat.

“You really wanna know, huh?”

He grinned and Peggy's stomach thudded into the floor.

 

It all started when Joyce decided to go for Chinese food.

Abe had been getting fidgety and and Joyce had downed half of a flask of strawberry Stoli when the kid whose ass she’d smacked threatened legal action, so the two of them piled into Joyce’s Jeep to ruin their lives with DUIs and possibly bring back some fried rice. That left Peggy here with Joan and Stan and Ken, all in different stages of boredom as the last few patrons trickled out of the gallery, and when had Joan jokingly suggested they play Truth or Dare they’d all groaned before relenting and getting way too into it.

Peggy had laid down the ground rules that Anita taught her forever ago:

     (1) One word yes/no answers were allowed, but don’t act shocked when everyone thinks you’re a wimp.

     (2) If you lie and are found out either your left boob or your dick will fall off (and then what would Stan think with?).

     (3) Whoever flakes out loses. And whoever wins has the right to one no holds barred favor.

Ken and Joan had both dropped out when Stan’s dares took a sadistic/overtly sexual turn respectively, but Peggy was a winner. It didn’t matter that this game had no fucking objective or that it was intended for six year old girls. She wanted to see him cry into his stupid headband and to fucking verbally castrate him-- to make him as angry as he made her on a regular basis.

Peggy wanted to break him, dammit.

“While your hippie boyfriend's out here writing for the New Dork Times and Ken’s dazzling us all with his alien babes I’m giving the people what they want.” Stan said, bragging as always, tugging up his raglan shirt for Joan’s benefit and smiling when Peggy’s eyes unconsciously flicked to the trailing hair there.

“Which is what?”

“Commissions, obviously. People like seeing things drawn. Their friends mostly, or their enemies." Stan pointedly stared at Peggy.

"So there's no weed."

"What? Hell no. That's Smitty's thing and I'm not moving in on his territory. He gets the first ten blocks down to the school, and I get everything from the school up."

Damn. She hadn't considered that.

"I don't see how you get away with it, man." Kenny leaned back in his chair. " If my old man was a cop I would be pissing myself every time I got a business call."

"I have a system." Stan looked tired, she noticed, around the eyes. "Truth or dare, Nancy Reagan."

"Truth." There was no way in hell she'd pick dare. Kenny had gagged for twenty minutes after licking the bottom of Joan's sneaker and she'd roll into the sea before doing anything remotely sexual with Stan.

"Why did you really transfer here?" He asked-- voice low and a little too serious-- with his eyebrows drawn together in feigned concern and Peggy swallowed against the tightening in her throat and the pricking in her eyes because _he knew_.

Somehow he, of all people, knew.

“That’s--” Peggy wiped her palms on her legs and tried to keep her face from reddening. “How?.” She hated that her heart started racing, and that Stan was openly pleased that he hit a nerve. Suddenly this wasn’t fun anymore. Peggy wished he’d asked her something easy, like why she hated him so much (he was an ass) or something typically boyish like if she was a virgin (nope) or her favorite fucking flavor of ice cream or a million other things. The room spun a little and her mouth dried completely and Stan was grinning as always, the smug motherfucker, while Kenny screwed his face up in question and Joan pouted and rubbed at her bare arms.

Peggy schooled her face into something neutral-- forced her lip to stop quivering, adjusted her glasses and stood-- legs numb from being drawn up against her chest in the cold. Things might have gone differently if Joyce were there to shut things down or if Abe could distract everyone with a pretentious dare to recycle for a month or something, but Stan was in his element here-- with Ken and Joan as an audience-- and she really fucking wasn't.

She had to get out of there.

“Let’s go, Joan.” Joan stopped rubbing her arms and practically lunged for the door.

“So you forfeit?”

“What-fucking-ever, Stan.”

“So I get my favor?”

This had to be illegal-- it must be in the bylaws somewhere-- that some things were off limits.

“I said whatever.”

She thought she'd covered her bases at school at least. But her mother gossiped so fucking much, and...

"Does your mom play bridge?"

Stan leaned forward, hands on his knees, and laughed.

"No."

 

 

\---

 

 

"Why Care Bears?"

"Huh?" Peggy whispered, groggily rolling over onto her side. " Everything sounded weird with Joan speaking three feet above her. "Oh, you mean the ceiling. The previous owner's daughter must have had a thing for the show. That's also why everything is pink and lavender. It's like sleeping in a fucking ice cream cake, and my mom won’t let me paint because we’ll probably move again."

Joan snorted. "This is tragic. If I had to sleep below this every night I'd go nuts."

"I usually stay on the bottom bunk for that very reason."

"And that's another thing. Bunk beds?" Joan stopped laughing just long enough to drag in a breath and start laughing again.

"Ah, yes. Just add it to my excellent reputation." Peggy sighed to regulate her breathing and felt the day's tension bleed out of her all at once. She wiggled her toes in the pile of laundry that she was using as cushion beneath her sleeping bag and stared at the wreckage of her bedroom. Ironically enough, personal organization wasn't her strong suit. “As if I don’t take enough abuse already.”

“That was shitty of him.” Joan bit out at the ceiling. “Sorry about whatever happened.” she said, most likely burrowing  for information that Peggy would never give.

“It’s fine.”  A thousand ‘sorry’s’ wouldn’t change something that happened years ago. “Stan just has it out for me, I guess.”

“You don’t think he--” Joyce began, her intended meaning obvious.

“No. The whole ‘he’ll be mean to you if he likes you’ thing doesn’t turn out well for most women-- my mother included. He hates me and I hate him. End of story.”

Suddenly Joan swung her head over the side of the top bunk, staring at her upside down in the almost nonexistent light-- her eyes widening as if this was a revelation before pulling herself back into what used to be Anita's space.

“Sorry we made it such hell for you when you got here. You’re kind of cool anyway.” Joan said, yawning and then sniffling a little from the head rush. “Ballsy at least.”

“It’s okay.” Peggy said, just realizing how far she’d come that she could say that. “I don’t care about the social life bullshit, really. I don’t give a fuck about the clubs or the student organizations or the plays or the endless committees. I just want to get my diploma and get out. Away from my mom and my sister-- away from this fucking zipcode-- and land a really solid job, and have my own apartment.” It felt good to say that out loud. All at once she remembered how utterly exhausting the constant humiliation could be.

There were perks to being invisible.

“Is that why you’re in Draper’s program--” Joan was hanging upside down again, and she looked gorgeous as always-- not at all like she’d climbed into a window ten minutes ago. “--to get out?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yep. My mother drives me up the wall."

A comfortable silence fell between them, broken only by the murmur of Duck's purring and Peggy could hear Joan's breathing even out.

“It's weird, because I've known Stan for a while actually." Peggy spoke into the darkness-- voice catching for some stupid reason.  "Our mothers used to go to evening Mass together."

"Hmphhh" Joan grunted quietly into her pillow.

The day had been moving so fast, and now it was moving so slowly. Peggy rolled onto her stomach and picked at a burned spot that was melted into the carpet. She couldn't believe she just had a civil conversation with Joan and she spent a couple of minutes deliberating on whether or not it was proper sleepover etiquette to say 'goodnight' to someone you kind of despised for the first half of the year so instead she settled on:

“I have a French exam in three hours.”

She couldn’t tell if Joan was ignoring her or asleep.

 

\---

 

 

_1.) Vous devriez __________ seulement une valise._

_a) amener_

_b) emmener_

_c) apporter_

_d) apporter_

_e) emporter_

 

Shit.

“Psst.”

Joyce groggily peeked over her metallic green hangover sunglasses and extended her arm across the aisle. Calvet was pacing at the head of the room-- eyes peeled for cheaters-- and Joyce was openly 'psst'-ing her in the middle of the French midterm with a slip of paper on her hand. She couldn't help Joyce; she couldn't help herself. If she hadn't gone to her gallery-turned-torture-chamber maybe she could have studied last night.

Maybe she could have showered.

Maybe she could ignore her.

The answer was... A? No, C?

Peggy tried to run through the conjugations in her head, through every foreign film Abe dragged her to this past July, but she was coming up blank. Her mental replay was last night on a loop-- Joan being nice and Stan's annoying nicknames and his stupid green eyes.

It was tragic, really, that her comebacks always seemed to come so fucking late. That morning she'd unsuccessfully tried to convince her mother that she was too ill to even drive Joanie to class, but a bathrobed Katherine had  mumbled over a cup of coffee that sick girls didn't crawl into windows at all hours and snatched her car keys.

"PSST!"

Peggy snatched the plasticky slip of paper from Joyce and slid it beneath her thigh, only tugging it out after Harry Crane raised his hand to say that number four said "abat-jour" twice and diverted everyone's attention. Joyce peeked over the shades again and Peggy grudgingly pulled the now damp slip of paper from under her leg and frowned.

It wasn't a note. It was a Polaroid.

In it Stan was sitting on a table, back to the camera, while Peggy glared at him from the floor, shoulders squared, the flare of the camera flash glinting off of her glasses.

Under it, written. In Joyce's sloppy all caps was "R U OK?".

Calmly, as quietly as possible Peggy scribbled a reply on the corner of her French test and waited until Harry complained that number six had an unnecessary accent to fold it in quarters and toss it at Joyce's back. A minute later a small balled up piece of notebook paper arced in the air before landing on her desk.

Holding her breath, Peggy uncrumpled it and under her message (did u go to china for that food?) was written something that Peggy couldn't quite read. The ink had smudged where Joyce folded it too fast, and--

"Miss Ramsay, I see you've decided to pass notes in my class during a test again. How bold." Calvet said in an angry version if her typical bossy clipped lisp. Wasn't she, like, twenty?

"Thank you, ma'am." Joyce said flatly, completely serious, and the entire class turned to the back of the room at once.

"I will not have cheating--" She looked at Peggy and then at Joyce who was snapping her gum. "--in my classroom. You know the rules. Read the note aloud please."

"What? No!" Peggy reached for the note but Joyce held it overhead and for the first time in her life Peggy thought mother might be right. She needed new friends.

Peggy was freaking out. Her heart was pounding and her vision blurred and blued at the edges and she felt like falling out of her seat until Joyce’s hand was cool on her arm and Joyce’s face was in her periphery. She winked over her shades and pulled the paper down to her side before whispering: "I got this."

"What was that?"

"Nothing, Miss Calvet!" Joyce yelled loudly enough for the kids imprisoned in Cooper's office to hear while Megan waited at the head of the room, annoyed because she couldn’t discipline her class.

"We're gonna get expelled." Peggy whispered, but Joyce raised her hand to stop her and pushed her sunglasses back into her hair. She stood up, hand on her hips and faced her audience.

"The note reads-- Wait, do you want just my part or should I read Peggy’s part?"

Megan colored in the face of what was escalating into a shitty disciplinary action while Peggy tried not to barf.

"Just read all of it."

“Okay, Miss Calvet, don’t pop a gasket. So--” Joyce cleared her throat. “So I said, here at the top of the note, ‘Hey, Peggy, let’s cheat on this fucking test.’”

Peggy buried her face in her hands and Megan colored more deeply when the class started tittering.

“Language!” she hissed-- veins straining in her neck. It wasn’t a good look.

“Okay, Okay. So I said, ‘Peggy, let’s cheat on this blanking test’ because I didn’t study worth sh-” she paused “-- worth anything. But Peggy wrote back ‘I think that it’s best we don’t cheat. Ms. Calvet wouldn’t like it.’ so I said ‘You know I can’t focus in this class. Throw me a bone.’  and then Peggy said no and that’s the end of it.” Joyce finished in a rush and stared-- deadpan-- at Megan in the front of the room.

“That’s it?” Megan said, leaning on her desk-- eyes wide with confusion as she looked for Peggy to corroborate.

“That's it.” Peggy said, voice shaking while she covered the corner she'd ripped out of her test with her hand.

The room was completely silent while Megan thought things over. She was visibly confused, chewing on a fingernail and frowning at the front of the classroom. For a minute Peggy thought she would cry.

“Why can’t you focus?” Ginsberg said, sinking low into his seat when the entire class turned toward him. “Is it like an ADD thing or--”

"I'm so glad you asked, Ginzo. Dearest Miss Calvet. Do you know why I can't focus in this class?"

The room fell quiet and twenty-six pairs of eyes focused on the front of the room.

"Why, Joyce?" Megan's exasperation was a little too campy to be completely heartfelt.

"Because you're too hot, Miss Calvet--"

"What?" Megan croaked in a voice that would be parodied in the cafeteria for weeks.

"--and quite frankly it's distracting."

"Thank you. I've been thinking that all year!" yelled a kid in the second row.

"I'm tryin’ to put the moves on my French teacher, Crane If you don't close your mouth, I swear on my father's Rolex that flies will nest."

"Detention, Joyce." Megan said in her soap opera voice, raising a hand to the bridge of her nose and pinching.

"We could have had it all, Calvet!"

"DETENTION!" The class jumped when Megan's slapped her desk with both hands.

"Fine, Miss Calvet. But there's no denying what we shared-- what we had."

Someone (people swore it was Harry Crane) started slow clapping and the room erupted into applause while Joyce sashayed out of the door. Megan's wrinkled her nose at Peggy and furiously scribbled out two pink slips-- bony fingers flying-- and tore them out at the exact moment Joyce poked her head in the door.

"Miss Calvet, my petite croissant.”

“Go!” Megan's glared at Peggy who just shrugged and started walking out of the room until Joyce yelled over her shoulder.

“We'll always have Paris, Miss Calvet!" Joyce tried to push past Peggy back into the classroom.

"I'M CANADIAN!"

 

 

\---

 

 

Don wears suits-- every fucking day he wears a suit. Peggy would bet that if she saw him on the Jersey Shore boardwalk in the dog days he would still be in a suit. And he keeps his Honors Economics classroom like a boardroom, with a single table lined up in the center of the room for bordered by swivel chairs that Ginsberg loves to spin in.

"Detention? You know I expect better of you than that-- of all of my students, but especially you. Is there any way you can retake the exam?"

“No. Calvet said that we both fail the test.” Peggy glanced at Don's cigarette and then at the floor. "Do I get kicked out of Honors for this?"

Don was staring out of the window with his back to her, steadily exhaling a plume of smoke before completely ignoring her question. “I need a favor.”

"What kind of favor?" Peggy asked warily.

"I need someone to watch my kids this Saturday." Don said, still facing the window with his shoulders tensed.

“Hey, I’m sorry about the detention, but life is punishing me enough right now. I’m not allowed outside of the house for a month unless it's for something strictly school related."

“Then say it's school related. I just need you to watch them for one night-- two days from now-- for a couple of hours. I'll get Cooper to waive your detention."

Peggy mumbled while Don was momentarily silent. "Isn't there something else I could do--like extra credit or community service?"

"No."

"Why?" Peggy knew she was whining. She also knew why Don needed her to watch his bad little kids, but she also wanted to hear him admit it-- out loud-- preferably with cameras around.

Peggy knows she has a look to her. It's the kind of look that teachers trust and every student knows is fake-- a wide eyed 'I fucked up but I'll try my darndest' kind of smile that she pulls out whenever the semester is ending and she's riding that fine line between a B+ and an A. Sal ate it up when she forgot the costumes for his production of Guys and Dolls at the dry cleaners, and she'd never had to use it on Roger, who passed literally every student that had the gall to stay in his US History class as a bribe so that no one told the administration that he just complained about his life for the entire hour.

Peggy had pulled it on Don, but he too has a look-- a squinty visionary deal that begins with him staring into the middle distance and ends with him getting whatever (or whoever) he wants. Now he looked constipated in the face of a situation he didn’t expect to have to explain.

The whole school knew that the two of them were fucking and she understood it, kind of. Megan was pretty and Don was, well... Don. He'd allegedly gotten one of the kindergarten teachers, Ms. Farrell, to resign with the power of his magic dick and that had ended in a clusterfuck of a divorce. And to be quite honest, she didn’t want any part of his sexy escapades. But he had a talent for wooing admissions officers and she had the grades of a champion and she needed him, for now.

"Are you even allowed to smoke in here?"

"I do whatever I damn please."

That much was true.

"You should know better than to get yourself into a situation like this."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means don't make waves. Don't waste time with kids who aren't as focused as you are about their futures."

Was Don hanging out with her mom or something?

"Fine. Do you want me to take them trick or treating or what?"

Don made a low scoffing noise that most likely meant he didn’t care.

"Just make sure they don't kill themselves or each other, all right?"

“Do I get paid?”

“You ‘get’ out of detention on Friday. Gene is allergic to milk and Bobby’s obsessed with Spider-Man right now. Don't let them watch Ghostbusters-- no matter what Sally tells you-- and they need to be in bed by nine.”

"Don't forget to use condoms this weekend. You wouldn't want a surprise fourth."

"Get out of my office."

 

 

\---

 

 

When the phone started ringing again, Peggy prayed for a telemarketer.

No such luck.

"They changed the name again." Whoever was on the other line was breathing heavily through their nose, and they paused barking into the phone to have a coughing fit.

"Pete, you should call Dawn about this shit. She's the one who handles all of the team uniforms, not me. How did you even get my work number?"

"The 7-11 is in the phone book, Peggy." Pete spat with his typical rich boy impatience. He was most likely pissy because Trudy had keyed his Mercedes that morning-- scratching a long silver line into the red finish and x-ing out the carving of their names in the tree in the parking lot.

"Hey!" Peggy looked up to see that Danny was here for the first time that day-- tossing Snickers bars into a bin and glowering.

"Repair guy's gonna be here in like twenty minutes." He smacked the side of the gutted Slurpee machine and scratched his stomach through his dirty green polo. "Get off of the fucking phone and make sure none of those punk ass kids are huffing my freon."

"Will do, Mr. Siegel." Peggy covered the mouth of the receiver and leaned over the counter when Danny went into the back for a mop. "Pete" she said, whispering so that her manager (her lazy, nepotistically appointed manager) wouldn't hear. "You have got to call someone else-- anyone else-- to handle this. I'm one Pop Rocks related mishap from being thrown out on my ass."

"I don't care about your life of poverty. The game is next Thursday and the dance is the night after that, and if you don't get your act together we're going to have to find a new junior senator." Pete resumed his high pitched coughing-- no, wait-- _crying_ and yelled "We're SC &P now!" before hanging up the phone.

She listened to the dial tone for a minute and stared out of the window with her glasses off-- not really focusing on anything and letting the multicolored bags of chips melt into a blurry rainbow-- staring at the red and yellow and brown leaves skittering outside of the automatic doors.

Peggy pulled her glasses back on and waited for the world or her shift to end-- whichever came first.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The semester FINALLY ENDED SO I CAN UPDATE OH MY GOD !!! Oh, yeah, and I should probably explain the note that was at the beginning of the chapter, haha. I messed up a character's name and I was mad about it lol. 
> 
> But yes! Updating! Soon!


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